ARTICLES FROM FIRST WEEK OF AUGUST OF THE ECONOMIST AND THE GUARDIAN

(AUG 1 8, 2015)
ANOTHER REASON FOR OBAMA TO WORRY ABOUT THE IRAN DEAL:
THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES
by David Kessner
If the Iran deal fails, there will be only one historical moment to which the defeat can be compared
Chuck Schumer is just one senator, but his announcement that he will oppose the international nuclear
agreement with Iran is being hailed as a potential game-changer. House and Senate Republicans are unanimous
in their determination to defeat the Presidents signature diplomatic achievement, and Democrats face strong
pressure from the powerful lobby AIPAC to reject it as well. If enough other Democrats in the House and Senate
follow suit, Congress could override a presidential veto, defeat the agreement and leave the United States and
Israel totally isolated within the world community. While foreign policy has often divided Congress and the
executive branch, cases in which Congress actually stopped a major foreign policy initiative are extremely rare. If
that happens, there will be only one historical moment to which the deals defeat can genuinely be compared: the
Senates refusal, in 1919 and 1920, to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. There are noteworthy parallels between the
two situations, and the consequences of another presidential defeat could be almost as serious as the end of
Woodrow Wilsons dreams of peace.
Confronted in 1914 by the First World War, President Wilson had spent almost two and a half years heroically
trying to bring it to a peaceful resolution. In 1915, after the sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine, he
had resisted Theodore Roosevelts demands for immediate intervention. But in the spring of 1917, when Germany
answered his last call for a peace without victory with a renewal of unrestricted submarine warfare, Wilson saw
no option but to intervene. Yet he remained politically aloof from his allied partners, and in January of 1918, in his
Fourteen Points, he held out his vision of a new world based on law, equality and what became the League of
Nations. But, when the war ended in November 1918 with the collapse of Germany, the French and British
despite Wilsons presence in Paris and his enormous international popularityinsisted on relatively harsh and
unequal terms for Germany. The treaty Wilson brought home for ratification struck many liberals as a betrayal of
his ideals.
Wilson, like Barack Obama, also had domestic political problems. Twice he had been elected without winning a
majority of the votes cast. In the Congressional elections of 1918 he appealed to the people to elect a
Democratic Congress to strengthen his hand in negotiations, but the Republicans won instead. Like Barack
Obama, Wilson was a somewhat aloof leader who had little patience with his intellectual inferiors. He made no
attempt to involve Republicans or Democrats from Congress in his negotiations. He also refused to accept
relatively harmless Congressional reservations about the deal. The Senate eventually voted down the treaty, which
failed to achieve a two-thirds majority.
The consequences were immense. When the treaty failed, France lost a promised Anglo-American guarantee of its
border with Germany, and the United States washed its hands of European problems, with the exception of the
war debts it still hoped to collect. The feeling that Washington could not be trusted to follow through on its noble
declarations prevented the U.S. from regaining world leadership until 1941, when the Second World War was well
underway. Rather than entering a new era of law and diplomacy, the world sank into anarchy.
Today, Barack Obama has even fewer cards to play than Wilson. There is not the slightest chance of his getting a
single Republican vote in Congress, and his own party willit now appearsbe split. His deal with Iran
represents a critical, desperately needed new departure in American foreign policy: an attempt to live with hostile
regimes by engaging them diplomatically, rather than either going to war with them or pursuing an endless, futile
confrontation. The deal also has the backing of the U.N. Security Council and of almost every other nation on
earth, except Israel. And its failure would leave Iran utterly free to pursue any nuclear program that it wants. Like
the Senates action in 1920, blocking the deal would end any possibility of genuine American global leadership for
some time. If the agreement fails, the worlds new slide into anarchy will accelerate, with consequences we
cannot foresee, even with the help of history. And that wont be all the Democratic Party has to worry about if the
President is beaten. In 1920, in the election after the Democrats failed to get the treaty through, the Republican
candidate won in a landslide.

UKs NEW MIGGRANT CONTROL POLICY: Proof of Panic

David Cameron tried to play the Calais migrant crisis relatively coolly last week. But the inference to be drawn
from two ministerial initiatives at the start of this week suggests the nightly scenes have triggered something
closer to official panic.
Ministers are suddenly falling over themselves to be seen making life harder for migrants of all kinds, not just
those besieging the Channel ports. On Sunday a Home Office minister said he was looking at removing financial
support from more than 10,000 failed asylum seekers in family groups. On Monday ministers gave details of how
they also intend to force landlords to evict immigrants who are in the UK illegally. Both measures are dubious in
principle and unworkable in practice. They confirm that the Cameron government is anything but confident about
its ability to keep political control of the issue, especially as the EU referendum begins to loom.
The moves against landlords are obviously a hasty headline response to the scenes from Calais. For one thing,
the powers the government is seeking are not new. The idea that landlords should be obliged not to rent to
tenants without the correct immigration status was first mooted in 2013. The Liberal Democrats managed to blunt
the proposal back then, so the policy has been piloted in five West Midlands areas for the past year. Landlords
there are required to conduct checks to establish that new tenants have the right to rent in the UK or face a
penalty of up to 3,000.
Yet now, in a textbook piece of bad ministerial practice, the communities secretary, Greg Clark, has simply swept
the pilot aside because it suits him at a politically awkward time. Mr Clark will now make the scheme compulsory
including it in the latest immigration bill, with criminal penalties attached even while the pilot is going on and
before it has been evaluated. Ministers had originally set up evaluation machinery that gave a proper role to other
stakeholders to help draw up a reasoned joint verdict. A phased rollout was anticipated even if the considered
verdict had been to go ahead. Now that has all been junked in the cause of saving face over Calais.
The difficulties of making the scheme work are too great to just ignore. The core issues are whether landlords
have enough knowledge of the necessary papers and visas, which is doubtful in the view of landlords bodies, and
whether that system will encourage racial profiling that discriminates against ethnic minority tenants irrespective
of nationality, which the landlords fear. Beyond that, there is the question of what happens to those who are
evicted, since eviction places a responsibility on local authorities, upheld by the courts, to provide appropriate
national assistance support. That obligation seems diametrically at odds with the new plans.
The reason for that is not hard to find. Ministers feel pressure to make gestures to the press and the public to
show they have migration under control. Mr Clark has fast-tracked the housing plan because there are riots at
Calais, not because it is a good plan. In fact, the West Midlands pilot has underlined many of the problems that
need to be properly assessed and judged before such a scheme is launched. But considerations of that kind
come second when ministers fear they are losing their grip across the Channel.
DECRIMINALIZING SEX WORK
Irrespective of whether the sex trade should be decriminalised for adults, this is not a policy question for human
rights organizations
Amnesty International is one of the great organisations of the modern world. Few can have done more to establish
the simple propositions that human rights matter and that they matter for everyone. It has exalted the lowly and
brought down the mighty from their seats. And it is poised to make a serious mistake.
The organisations international council meeting in Dublin which starts on Friday this week will consider a motion
urging that sex work be decriminalised. This is in itself a contestable position. There are many feminists who
recoil from it. The letter signed byfilm actors who are normally reliable allies of Amnesty shows how damaging it
is. On the other hand there is a body of professional opinion quoted in the Amnesty proposal, which argues that
decriminalising sex work minimises the harm done to sex workers and allows it to be more effectively regulated.
The Amnesty proposal is carefully framed to avoid the obvious evils. It is not as silly or immoral as headlines can
make it appear. It would only apply to adults over 18 who were working without coercion, deceit or violence. It
addresses a real, global problem, which is that sex workers are almost everywhere treated as outcasts who may
be exploited at will. Their rights are routinely violated, in part because they are sex workers. Nonetheless, the
organisation should reject the policy.
There are two related reasons why. The first is the incoherence of the position paper and the libertarian ideals
which inform it. It gives the impression of having emerged from sex-work policy-wonking rather than a careful
consideration of the ways in which human rights around the world can best be defended and upheld. The

suggestion that the trade be decriminalised but not then regulated is particularly far off-beam. Since when did
unregulated markets guarantee human rights? There is nothing intrinsically repugnant to human rights in sex work
if you exclude violence, deceit and the exploitation of children. But these arent fringe phenomena. They are
central parts of the trade in most places round the world. To take as normative the experience of protected
western adults is a morally disabling form of privilege.
Of course, Amnesty is itself opposed to violence, coercion and the exploitation of children. There are some
harrowing stories in the report of the brutal maltreatment of sex workers all over the world. But all of these things
are already abhorrent to Amnesty. As the report itself says: Guaranteeing human rights without discrimination is
the most effective way to ensure the empowerment of people involved in sex work and the protection of all
individuals from discrimination, violence, and coercion. It is wrong to murder sex workers, or to kidnap and rape
them, but it is just as wrong to treat anyone in those ways. No special legislation or policies are needed to
establish that beyond the fundamental commitment to uphold human rights.
The founding principle of human rights law and human rights thinking generally is that there are certain things
which it is always and everywhere wrong to do to anyone, irrespective of their crimes, their moral character, or the
danger that they may pose to the state for many of the prisoners whom Amnesty defends really are a danger to
the corrupt and authoritarian states which persecute them, just as many of the criminals whom Amnesty attempts
to shield from the death penalty have indeed committed terrible crimes. These are irrelevant. The relevant
principle is that there are certain things which no state should do to any citizen.
This is in itself a fiercely controversial principle, which almost all states implicitly or explicitly reject when it comes
to their own actions. But it is one of supreme importance, and the purpose of Amnestys existence is to uphold it
impartially. Nothing which conflicts with this aim or detracts from it should be considered as Amnesty policy. The
proposal to decriminalise the sex trade clearly fails the test, and this is the second reason why the Dublin
meeting should reject it.
Obviously, Amnesty is right to say that sex workers have human rights and that these should be respected. But
many Amnesty supporters believe that the trade itself tends to corrupt or to violate these rights, except for a lucky
few participants. The broadest coalitions unite around the narrowest agendas. A call to decriminalise sex work is a
distraction from Amnestys core mission, and dangerous to it too.

This article was amended on 3 August 2015. An earlier version of the headline and text said legalise,
rather than decriminalise sex work

POPULATION CONTROL:
EMPOWERING WOMEN MAY NOT SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT
The United Nations has published its latest projections for world population. It predicts that the current 7.3bn
people on the planet will reach 8.5bn in 2030, and could be 11.2bn at the end of the century. India is expected to
overtake China as the most populous country.
The annually updated forecasts are fuel for a strengthening argument that growing population is a critical
environmental issue. The logic is simple: increasing numbers of people multiplied by higher average consumption
from wood fuel to mobile phones and intensively farmed meat is a double whammy for the environment. The
results are depleted raw materials and polluted soil, water and air. Greenhouse gas emissions causing climate
change, specifically carbon dioxide, are the common measurement of this relationship. So persuasive is the
strand of thought that it has attracted backing from respected public figures such as Sir David Attenborough,
Jonathon Porritt and Chris Packham. But it is flawed.
If expanding population is a problem, campaigners on the subject advocate action to slow and stop the rise, if not
reverse it. (The UK group Population Matters, for example, says it is responsible to have one or two children
below the replacement rate at which population would be stable.) This presents challenges. The first is that much
of the rise in population is due to people living longer. Nobody is credibly suggesting that society should cease
trying to find cures for disease or stop stepping into disaster zones to save lives.
Any reduction in population rates, therefore, falls on women having fewer children. This has happened average
fertility has been falling for years, even in Africa, which continues to have the highest number of children per
woman. But the second challenge for population campaigners is that biodiversity loss and pollution continue
apace.

The fact is that it is in the very poorest countries where women have the most children, on average. And where
population growth slows, generally economic growth speeds up, and carbon emissions rise faster. This happens
on a global scale and even within countries certainly within the poorer ones where there is most scope for
population control, and where, also, the potential for industrialisation is greatest. It is unclear which is cause and
which is effect: it is likely that they play off each other. And in some cases, perhaps, population policies go hand
in hand with economic reforms. Only in the wealthiest countries, though, which already have lower fertility rates,
are these links weakened or even broken.
This phenomenon raises the counterintuitive possibility that curbing population growth could generate higher
global emissions than would otherwise be the case. There are good reasons for addressing birth rates:
empowerment of women is a major one. And education, birth control clinics and popular soap operas in Brazil and
radio programmes in Africa have all been successfully used to this end. But as an environmental policy, reducing
the number of people is questionable. It provides a convenient distraction for richer nations with lower birthrates
from the pressing need to reduce or decarbonise consumption. Worse, focusing on population growth could
actually accelerate the global environmental problem it claims to address.